Screening at St Comgall’s Ionad Eileen Howell, in the area where it was originally filmed, Acceptable Levels is the result of a collaboration between Kate McManus and Alistair Herron from the Belfast Film Workshop and John Davies, Ellin Hare, and Robert Smith from Frontroom Productions.
The film was made through the innovative Channel 4 workshop scheme to fund small-scale independent productions and was the first feature film to be made under this arrangement. It was shot mainly in Belfast by Frontroom Productions and the Belfast Film Workshop using a cast of professional and non-professional actors. The film title comes from a comment made by British Home Secretary Reginald Maudling in the 1970s, that the best that could be hoped for was ‘a return to acceptable levels of violence.’
The film shows not only what this meant in practice to the community in Belfast, but also the media processes that made it acceptable to the British public. Filmmakers, John Davies, Alistair Herron and Kate McManus will take part in a Q&A after the film. This screening came about from a collaboration with the Recording History oral history project.
Working with the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Ulster Museum and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI), this research foregrounds the work of international artists and filmmakers active in the north of Ireland from 1968. Led by Dr Isobel Harbison, Recording History aims to address under-documented histories of artists’ and independent film made in Northern Ireland/ the north of Ireland from 1968 to 1990, and to consider these works in relation to existing national collections, facilities, and archives. The oral history interviews undertaken as part of the project will be preserved and made available at PRONI.